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Friday, January 9, 2015

6 years

2015 brings year six of doing diabetes. While the other years have felt 'milestone-y,' this year does not. Grace mentioned to me the other day 'You know Mom, January 9th will be six years.' The way she said it was melancholy, not with an air of the incredible to it.

Yet it is, you know, incredible. All of it is.
Maybe I'd be best to remember that about year six.

Becoming complacent with diabetes means it will come and kick you in the ass, hard. Repeatedly.
To remind you that it should be taken seriously.

I find myself floating through days, days become weeks and soon it's a month, and all is fine. We have some highs, we have some lows, but we correct and glide onto the next day. Pod changes, yeah yeah yeah, every three days. Yes, reset Dex and move on. Yeah Grace, just dose on the Dex and what it says. All the motions, but none of the feeling.

Then a day will hit us that knocks us to our knees. We were complacent about the depth of this damn disease. And all of a sudden, we are 348, or we are 37. It hits and it hits hard.

Six years. 2,190 days. And here she is.

I often tell Grace that diabetes should take a backseat to whatever she would like to do in life. Let it ride, don't let it drive. Grace, don't ever let it drive. It stinks at driving. YOU drive. You know the way. You be in charge.

A few times this year Grace had times of not wanting to do it any more. Of being fed up with all the care, the monitoring, the getting the damn PDM once again to dose for something she wanted to eat, the hurt from a cannula that feels wrong, the fingersticks. All of it, wrapped in one big bow. One never thinks it will be their child affected by depression in the midst of diabetes, but that monster is leaning in, over our shoulders. I kick it away. It doesn't obey and comes back just to look at us, daring us not to listen for a bit to what it has to say.

I can tell her I understand, but I don't have diabetes. All I can do is listen and tell her how much she is loved and care for, how much I would take it all away in an instant if I could, how brave and strong and true she is to do this, day after day after day, and how very resilient she is. And as the words leave my mouth, I pair them with my prayer that she live a long life. A very long life.

They give medals for living with diabetes 25, 50 and 75 years. Damn it, they just added the 75 year one cause people finally did live 75 years with it. Imagine that, before this time, they didn't even have a damn medal cause people didn't live that long with it. I pray she gets a 75 year medal.
She will be 81.

All of this floods me at year six. It's the year we know we are on the road for a good long time. I cannot look too far ahead with Grace, I have no idea what the road will bring to us both. We just stay in the driver's seat.

I know she is strong.
I know she is loved beyond measure.
I know she made it one more blessed year.

What a beautiful post. You've captured everything we feel as T1 parents - particularly for me, lately, as my 7-year old has wanted to give up after only 3 years.

Comforting them is so hard, when diabetes IS so crap, and we can't make it better for them. I'm fighting her depression with fire (and appointments), and going a bit easy on her with her crazy moods and rages. It doesn't feel like I'm able to help enough though. She has an alert dog who does wonders for calming her mood.

So glad I found your blog. Looking forward to following Grace as she treads the path a few years ahead of us. She's just lovely.

how you climb up the mountain is just as important as how you get down the mountain. and, so it is with life, which for many of us becomes one big gigantic test followed by one big gigantic lesson. in the end, it all comes down to one word. grace. it’s how you accept winning and losing, good luck and bad luck, the darkness and the light.